Interstellar Delivery Service Project Summary
This game was made for the final project for CS 510 Game Programming. It was made in the Unity Game Engine in C#.
The game was develop in four stages throughout the term: prof-of-concept, alpha, beta, and final.
During the proof-of-concept stage I worked on the ship asset, the inventory system, and the inventory/trading menus.
In the Alpha stage I almost completely refactored the inventory system, added an upgrade system, and added assets for the planets, asteroids, and stations in zone 1.
In the Beta stage I reworked the player menus, built a main menu, worked on a system for transitioning between zones, and almost finished the progression system. My teammate and I decided to change the scope of the game from a trading game to a delivery game at this point, since an economy system would have added unnecessary complexity to a game that was already difficult to learn.
In the Final stage I finished adding the features and worked on debugging the game. These features included stats such as armor, shields, and rocket thrust, and the environmental damage sources such as asteroid collision and star proximity.
Project Take-Aways
- Intelligently reducing scope can drastically improve a game while also reducing the workload
- Inventory systems are some of the most complex systems in games
- I prefer C++ to C#
- The Observer pattern is extremely useful in game programming